Talking about Guitar: Evolution, Routines, Intonation, and Improvisation
Answering a few questions sent in regarding my approach
Today is release day. The debut Grave Domain album is now live on Bandcamp and on Spotify and YouTube and all that. In response to a handful of questions that came in last month to our ongoing Q&A, I thought that today would be a good day to write up some answers. These were all about guitar playing… which is something I could speak about ad nauseam for hours. For your benefit, I kept it to just three responses here.
Q. How has your guitar playing evolved?
A. Very early on I was influenced by the sounds and structures of late 70s jazz fusion. That's solely because I had either the fortune or misfortune (depending on your point of view) of learning from a teacher who was really into that world. The punk thing sort of shook that up a bit, but even then I was more into punk bands that were more exploratory than the typical three chord tune. And with metal, I really fell in love with the endless variety. Now, over the years I've played folk and bluegrass, I've played honky-tonk music, I've been on tour with free improvisational groups, and I've played in pit bands for musicals. So, my vocabulary is pretty broad. In terms of the evolution of my own technique, I think it's less a thing you can hear in my playing in the sense of hearing someone like Eddie Van Halen and immediately knowing it's Eddie Van Halen and more of a thing that from all of these experiences I've been able to put together a toolkit that lets me work on any type of song. And that means that I can concentrate on doing things in the service of the song.
Q. Do you have any particular warm-up routines?
A. I always warm up by playing be-bop tunes. And I try to pay attention to the feel of the neck and the feel of the pick hitting the strings. I know I'm ready to play when I stop noticing the picking action. So, I tend to use a lot of legato. But I also like tremolo picking — sort of a technique common to both bluegrass and black metal. And I like when that comes out in my playing without consciously thinking about making it happen. Intonation is also important. And part of my routine is really thinking about and paying attention to the intonation available on the instrument. My guitars are set up in ways that when I let other people play them they tend to sound out of tune. I put a lot of physical pressure on the strings and so I've ended up tuning and setting up my guitars in more of a microtonal way than purely a strict adherence to proper tuning of the strings. I'm always sort of bending or contorting lines and chords to come into proper tune depending on the guitar. Now, I almost exclusively play in standard tuning, but if you evaluated each individual string you'd find that they were off (some up and some down) — though in a microtonally consistent way. In terms of bending notes, one thing I've done over time is to stop relying on the bridge to do any of the work for me. So, on the Strat, I've got the bridge completely decked to the body. I like the feel of it on my palm and I think it provides a nice sustain, but I don't use it via a whammy bar or anything to bend notes or induce vibrato. That all has to come out of my fingers. And for me that makes the playing feel more like I'm doing manual work and I like that.
Q. How do you balance structured, pre-composed parts with improvisation in your solos and arrangements?
A. That's some question, music school nerd. But yeah, the solo on the instrumental song 'Protector of the Graves' is a good example. It's a single take improvised solo, but because I'd already tracked all of the bass and drums and synths, I already had a pretty good idea in my mind as to where it would go. Whether or not I could pull it off is another thing — that's always a tightrope act. On the cover song, 'Have We Been Here Before', I play a solo that's entirely based on the melody of the verse. In some ways that's more difficult because you want to strike a balance between the melody and keeping it fresh. Sometimes that's where your gear can help you. On that one I use the wah sort of subtly with a lot of gain off the amp to get some great sustain and feedback that lets the melody naturally sort of degrade and evolve in parts. Towards the end it completely wipes out, which is fine... nothing goes "wrong" when you are improvising, things only go sideways and lead you to a different set of decisions that you have to make than for which otherwise you might have been prepared.